Ghana's wealthy Adjei family owns 86% of Kasapreko, a stake now worth $540 million

The Adjei family holds 3,546,666,667 shares in Kasapreko, or 85.88% of the Ghanaian drinks maker, a stake worth 6.28 billion cedis at the closing price of 1.770 cedis on Sept. 23.

That is about $539.8 million at 11.63 cedis to the dollar.

The same holding was worth roughly $366 million at the 1.20 cedi price the company sold shares at in June, which means the listing has added close to $174 million to the family's paper wealth in three months.

How the family holds it

None of the shares sit in anyone's personal name.

All of the pre-IPO stock belongs to Pinnacle Holding Company Limited, which is owned in equal parts by five people: Abigail Adjei, Emelia Adjei, Eunice Adjei, Isaac Adjei and Richard Adjei. A fifth of the holding company works out at 709.3 million Kasapreko shares each, worth about 1.26 billion cedis, or roughly $108 million a head.

Dr Kwabena Adjei, who founded the business, does not appear on that register. Neither did any of Kasapreko's directors hold shares directly at the time of the offer. Samuel Abordo runs Pinnacle as group chief executive.

What happened at the listing

Kasapreko sold 583,333,333 new shares at 1.20 cedis each between May 4 and June 1, raising 700 million cedis, about $60 million.

Demand ran well past that. The offer drew 1.73 billion cedis of subscriptions from 18,781 investors, an oversubscription of 146%, and the company allotted roughly 40.6% of what people asked for. Databank, Consolidated Bank Ghana and Absa Bank Ghana ran the offer, which was not underwritten, leaving Kasapreko carrying the risk if subscriptions had fallen below a 350 million cedi minimum.

Ghanaian pension funds, which held around 120 billion cedis at the end of the first quarter, anchored the book.

Trading began on June 15 under the ticker KASA.

What the shares have done since

The stock hit the exchange's 10% daily limit on its first day, closing at 1.32 cedis, and kept climbing to 1.91 by June 19. It peaked at 2.30 cedis on June 23, eight days after listing, then fell back to 1.88 within a week, recovered to 2.15 by July 22 and has since drifted to 1.770.

That leaves it 47.5% above the offer price and 23% below its June peak. The whole company is now worth 7.31 billion cedis, about $629 million.

Where the company came from

Kwabena Adjei started Kasapreko in a garage in Nungua, a suburb of Accra, in 1987, with five employees.

What he built it on was Alomo Bitters, a herbal alcoholic drink that became one of the best-known consumer brands in West Africa. The company added Storm energy drink and Awake bottled water, and it now employs more than 2,300 people and exports to Nigeria, Togo, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Gambia, as well as Europe and North America.

The numbers behind the price

Revenue rose from 660 million cedis in 2020 to 3.5 billion in 2025, a compound annual growth rate of 40%. Gross profit grew faster still, compounding at 45% to reach 1.12 billion cedis.

The company made 341.8 million cedis of net profit in 2025, after posting a loss in 2022.

It came to market cheaply against its peers. The offer price implied 11.3 times forecast 2026 earnings and 5.4 times enterprise value to earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation, against averages of 13.2 and 7.6 across comparable listed brewers including Guinness Ghana Breweries, East African Breweries and Nigerian Breweries.

Who runs it

Richard Adjei is managing director, and he is the founder's son.

The board of the listed company is chaired by Samuel Leslie Adetola, an independent non-executive director, and includes Richard Adjei, his father and four other independent or non-executive directors. Adjei called the listing a vote of confidence in Ghanaian enterprise and local manufacturing on the day it began trading.

About 96% of the money raised is going into a single project: a new plant at Adeiso in Ghana's Eastern Region to make bottled water and carbonated soft drinks.

The market it listed into

Kasapreko was the third oversubscribed Ghanaian offering in six months, after First Atlantic Bank in December 2025 and ZEN Petroleum in March 2026, and the three between them were expected to add about 11 billion cedis to the exchange's value.

The Ghana Stock Exchange composite index had risen 64.67% this year at the time of the listing, with total market capitalisation of 275.72 billion cedis. Abena Amoah, who runs the exchange, said the run of oversubscribed offers showed strengthening confidence in listed companies.